If you did a type 2 installation and allowed Puppy to take over your entire hard drive, which it sounds like, then you need to partition the hard drive, so Windows can see it again. Windows can't see Linux partitions and thinks that you have no hard drive space to partition.

If you know what hard drive is in the system, you can download a utility to format the drive from the manufacturer. Most have a utility that can be run from two floppy disks. Of course, this assumes that you have another computer to download the utility.

You can get a Windows boot disk and use fdisk to format the drive.

You should be able to use the Linux fdisk utility to do the same.

Also, Knoppix and Mepis have a utility called qtparted that can do the job.

When you say a recovery disk, is this a Dell or Gateway system?

PartitionMagic recovery disks can also do this for you.

Let us know what your situation is._________________I love it when a plan comes together

Which boot disk should I use?
I tried this before in MEPIS, and it still gave me the "Failed to create user parition".

Would it matter if the OLD Hard-drive had windows XP on it, and then I had to exchange it out for an older one that had windows 98 (this one's in my PC right now) but i formatted it and put puppy linux, because whenever I tried to run XP system recovery disks for some reason it partitioned the drive as a windows 95 FAT13 (or something like that) parition.

For some reason though, it keeps on saying "Failed to create user parition"

I should have clarified, that qtparted is not the best. It is not without problems. It also does not handle NTFS well at all.

The easiest thing to do is to format it as fat32, then let the windows XP disk do the work.

Sometimes the drive gets corrupted using too many utilities, so that it seems unrecoverable.

I have found, if you know what drive make that you have, the manufacturer's utility will do the job well. They often will also ask what OS you will be installing, to set up the drive "ready" for windows whatever.

I just had to wipe my secondary drive, as a SuSE caused the drive to be unreadable by PartitionMagic. There were some issues with some distros drive partitioning tools making valid ext2 or ext3 partitons next to NTFS volumes. This has been fixed. Yes, it had to do with kernel 2.6!_________________I love it when a plan comes together

Boot your XP disk up and do a new install, when it comes to the partition section delete and create the partitions you require.
Format the win partition as NTFS if you want security and finish the install.

flamesarge, do you have XP on the system now, or is this a fresh installation that you want to do? It sounded to me that you wanted to do a fresh installation of XP and that it was not currently on your system.

In other words, do you just have Puppy on an ext2 partiton (type 2 installation) and it occupies your total hard drive, or do you have more than one partition on the drive (Puppy gave you more than one option of a partiton to install to)?

If you have XP already on the system, you can recover the MBR, as suggested, by getting into the recovery console using the XP disk and fix the MBR so Windows will boot. But if this were the case, you can use grub, if it is installed to boot XP without recovering the MBR, with a little manipulation.

If the total drive is occupied by Puppy on a Linux partition, and it is the only drive in the system, XP will freak out. It can't see the partition and thinks there is no available space on the drive to format.

If Puppy occupies everything, XP needs to be installed first, then you can resize the drive to make room for a type 2 install.

If Puppy occupies the entire hard drive, then you can use Ian's suggestion to delete the partition, then try to install XP.

If all this is confusing, then try the utility that your hard drive manufacturer has. The one that you use depends on what make hard drive that you have on the system.

Of course no matter what you do, you need a way to boot Puppy. The easiest thing to do, would be to wipe the partiton, install XP, then make room for Puppy and do a Puppy installation.

Perhaps someone has a better way to do this. Clarify exactly what your situation is and then everyone can suggest a logical solution._________________I love it when a plan comes together

Ok, I have MEPIS linux on my OLD HARD DRIVE (A,let's call it.) A was in my computer origionally, but then it some how got coruppted and or died.
Then I just recently replaced it with Harddrive B, B had windows 98 on it, and I wanted to install Windows XP on HD B.
But when i put in the disk it kept on coming up with 'failed to create user partition'.

It appears that your problem is unrelated to Puppy so the best advice I can give you is to scrap everything and start from scratch.

If you have the 1.0.3 live Puppy CD boot it up taking the no 2 option and then using fdisk or cfdisk delete all partitions.

Alternatively you could use a Windows startup floppy and using fdisk delete all partitions.

Boot from your XP disk, create two partitions and format the first one as NTFS.

Install XP to the first partition.

Boot Puppy with the 2 option and using fdisk rename the second partition as 83 a Linux native partition. Exit fdisk and use the mkfs command format the second partition as ext2 then using the install wizard install Puppy.

You can either use the boot floppy, install Grub or make a Grub boot CD to boot both Puppy and Windows.

There is also the distinct possibility that your hard drive has damaged sectors.

If you get the make and model of the harddrive and go to the manufacturers website, there is usually some downloadable utilities for remapping the hard drive, flagging bad sectors, fixing problems and re-initialising the disk with a low level format.
If the HD is dying then it will only fend off the inevitable, but it's certainly worth a try

<<Edit : just noticed that someone has already mentioned doing this - sorry for the repetition. Did anyone mention swapping the connecting ribbon cable over? sometimes an unreliable hard disk is a result of poor data transfer and a new cable sorts it out. >>

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